Quorum OnQ Reviews

The primary use case of this solution is for the instant recovery of servers and security. Our customers generally have in the range of anything between 20 to 75 servers. Corporate and enterprise customers purchase it for their on premises requirements. We not only recover the servers, we ensure recovery of the business process and that's very important. We have a partnership with Quorum. 

Quorum offers a very high level security environment for secondary data. Once data is in Quorum it is highly secured because the appliance is Linux-based. It does 256-bit AES encryption at rest and in motion. The replication agent and everything is all Linux-based including the hypervisor. And it is a ZFS, Zeta File System, which makes the environment highly secure. The dashboard is also quite new and elegant.

The solution could do more by improving compatibility in terms of supporting other OS. In addition, the platform support should increase as there are some restrictions there. It's the only challenge we face right now.

I've been selling Quorum for the past eight years. 

The product has been quite stable. We see less RMA issues than we used to have and less support issues. It's a robust solution because of its Linux base and the fact that it's not a software-based solution. It comes with a very high-end appliance which is built on a hyper-converge infrastructure.

It has good scalability although there are some of the lower models where there is a restriction on scalabiity. From a 15dB appliance, you can scale it up to 100dB or 150dB. 

Support is very much available from the UK and the US, directly from the vendor. They don't offer support via third-party support services, you're actually dealing with the people who have developed the solution so the turnaround time is quite quick.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Deployment time depends on the number of servers but typically a 10-server implementation would take four to six hours.

The solution is designed individually based on the customer's specifications. It's all hand-seated and then dispatched to the customers. We have a lot of references from happy customers. Many four-star, five-star hotels here in the Middle East use Quorum so within the hotel hospitality fraternity, everybody knows Quorum which makes it easy to sell to other hotels. A lot of prestigious customers use Quorum; government, tourism authority, chamber of commerce, police headquarters, airports. That in itself is a good reference and the product speaks for itself. Once you do a proof of concept with the customer, they can see how it works on their network, and then it's an easy sale.

The product serves the customer's objectives as well as securing secondary data and instant recovery of their complete applications and business process. The customer wants to ensure his business processes record and that's what Quorum ensures. Whether it is a single server failure, storage failure, network failure, a digital attack or a ransomware, or whether it's an application crash or a database corruption, or any kind of natural disaster or data center failure, Quorum ensures the recovery of the complete business process. 

I believe our customers would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

The primary use case for us is a high-availability. The ease of use is a part of that as well. The ability to spin up a backed-up VM or to put it on the production network, literally in a matter of minutes, if a VM goes down, is critical for us.

If a VM goes down for whatever reason — having that assurance that we've got a reliable backed up VM on a separate platform that we can spin up on a different piece of hardware and appliance in real-time, and get the resource back up and running again quickly, is the best use case for us.

One of the benefits of the onQ platform is that it does what it does, and it does it well. It's very easy to keep up and running. In terms of day-to-day management, once you have everything in place, it does its job and takes the snapshots for you and gives you the reporting back on them. From a solution standpoint, it works very well.

Being able to spin up another VM on the appliance, in production mode, within a matter of a couple of minutes, has been immensely helpful. Having the ability to reduce recovery time, for critical resources, from multiple hours to a matter of minutes, is huge.

It's easy to manage. We're a smaller team.  It's easy to implement, easy to spin up, easily configurable, to drop-in appliances and network. There wasn't a lot of time needed to spin it up. 

From a day-to-day management perspective, it's very easy to use as well.

And I get reporting on the latest backup every day, whether or not it was successful, and whether or not the test of the VM was successful. It comes to me by email and gives me the status of each of the VMs: When it was last backed up, whether or not the backup was successful, and whether or not the test was successful. 

Upgrading the software on the appliance feels to me like it's going to be a little bit more work than I originally anticipated.

The process for moving the VM off of the Quorum appliance and back into the production network again requires quite a number of steps. I don't know if there can be any improvement made on that, but in looking at it, I found it was pretty lengthy. There were quite a number of steps there so I requested that one of the Quorum engineers perform the process, which they were happy to do. That part was great. They were able to get that VM moved over from the appliance to my production network again and everything was fine.

We've been using onQ since 2015. 

The stability has been great. The appliance has been rock-solid. I've had no issues with the hardware. We've had the same appliance for the last four years now and it has been running great. It requires very little management time, if any. It just runs and works.

The scalability is  good, from what I remember. We haven't scaled up a ton. The capacity planning that was done originally, with the estimated growth that we put in for headroom, for expansion and growth, was accurate. We've been able to grow into the solution without making any changes or any adjustments. Scalability was planned out at the beginning. I've been in great shape there.

One of the things that I like about Quorum is the level of support. 

Overall, their support folks are great. They have proactively reached out to me when they've noticed issues with the backup not taking for a few days, or outside of a threshold, or if they've seen any issue where a VM has not been successful in testing over the last couple of days. They'll proactively reach out to me.

I've had cases where I actually shut down a VM from production because I didn't need it anymore but forgot about the Quorum appliance trying to take snapshots of it. It kept failing and I just ignored it on the report because I knew about it. But the Quorum support folks didn't know that that's what happened. They were a little concerned that the device hadn't backed up in X amount of days. They actually reached out to me and said, "Hey, we saw that your VM X-Y-Z hasn't been backed up. What's going on with that? Do you need help?" That was impressive. It feels like they've got my back as well. It's not just me who has visibility or eyes on the backups. I'm getting a little assistance from their NOC or support team which, in some cases, keeps track of the statuses of those backups too.

We had a solution, but it was a very manual, labor-intensive, not-full-VM appliance. 

For us, partnering with an organization like Quorum, a company that basically hands it to you in a box and it's all ready to go and implement quickly and easily, without a lot of management resource on my end to keep the thing running — it just does what it's supposed to do — is the best approach at this point.

The initial setup was relatively straight forward. That was one of the selling points of Quorum with the appliance device. I did some due diligence and figured out sizing capacity, so they could size the appliance correctly. They had me run some tools for capacity-planning in my environment. They took all that information and they came up with the right size solution for the appliance that I needed.

To provision the appliance, they had me drop it into my network and spin it up, which is very easy to do. Once they had connectivity to it we finished the configuration on it. They then gave me the ability to manage the appliance and start getting backups from my VM environment onto it. 

So the implementation rollout was a very easy, handheld process. They did a lot of handholding and it was very white-glove. It was very easy, which was great.

I worked with one or two of their engineers.

We haven't really fully measured ROI.  I definitely believe there has been ROI.

The solution can be on the pricier side depending on options selected but it's one of those situations where if time is valuable and resources are limited, it might be worth it.  Each use case is unique.

We evaluated a couple of other players, including Datto. Ease of use was one of the differences between Quorum and Datto. I think there were some problems with Datto, as I remember. I did a lot of research on forums and sites, like ITCentralStation.com, from an end-user perspective in different environments. That gave me an idea as to what the solution was like after it was implemented, installed, and up and running. I really relied on what the community was saying about the different solutions. Each one has its pros and cons.

For our organization, after reading all the reviews and commentary, and taking into consideration points that mattered to us, it really came down to Quorum, from many different angles, being the front-runner.

Look at all the partners out there and pick the one that you feel is the best fit for you, based on your use case. Everyone is a little bit different and has different needs in terms of what's critical to them and what's not important.

I give Quorum a solid nine out of 10. Over a number of years it has been a rock-solid solution. It has worked for us. It's easy to manage. It doesn't take a lot of my time. It does what it needs to do. When I have had to use it and rely upon it, it has been there.

The onsite version keeps our backups for all of our NOC servers, which is everything operational. We get backups every four hours or so, and should something happen — someone deletes something or a server's hardware goes out — we're able to restore that locally, very quickly. The Quorum will run a virtual machine, the recovery node of the server, from the latest backup, within minutes of having an issue.

Our deployment of the solution is both on-prem and cloud. We're only sending a few specific servers to the Quorum cloud, which hosted by them. We have our onsite device as well which backs everything up.

We had a few instances where someone who had access to some accounting shares got infected and no one could access those files. We were able to lock down the infection on that person's computer and, within an hour of it being detected, restore files to four hours prior, when there was no infection. So we were only set back on a few files by a few hours instead of a day or two.

We've also had hardware failures on physical servers. We were able to restore the recovery node and bring the server back up, with the users unaware that there was ever a problem, other than losing connection briefly while the recovery node came online. There may have only been a few hours lost instead of a day, where we had to fix the physical server and then bring it online.

With the restore function on the Quorum, we're able to go down to the individual file level for each backup, and we have 40 or 60 backups available. We are able to restore the files to exactly where they were, through Quorum's interface. It's very easy to go through if you've ever used a file system as a system administrator. It is very intuitive to navigate and recover the files to exactly where they were when they were backed up.

The biggest feature is being able to do a file recovery to the original server. That is extremely useful and has saved us a few times when we've had ransomware. In some of those cases, people's computers were locked down by viruses which spread to things they had access to, including server shares. But we were easily able to just restore to four hours prior, instead of a day or two or more ago. That has been extremely useful.

And being able to bring a server up from the same backup from a few hours ago, if the server were to crash or have issues, is valuable.

When it comes to recovering what we need from a backup, it's very easy to use. The interface is very straightforward in getting to your goal. It has made file recovery very easy, very simple, and quick.

Also, the automated testing functionality seems accurate. If it comes back and says there's a problem, I can always contact support and usually it's just that there is a little hiccup. They run a few commands and resolve any automatic report issues. In our case, we have some older servers which don't necessarily report correctly even though their recovery nodes will power on.

We've been using Quorum for at least six years. The company had it before I started working here.

Quorum is very stable. We've had a few hiccups over the years, but they weren't anything that Quorum didn't quickly support us on, or replace any hard drives that may have been awry.

It seems to scale very easily, as long as you have the hard drive space.

We currently have 12 servers that are being backed up every four hours. That includes SQL servers, an Exchange Server, database servers, and domain controllers.

Quorum support is very good. They have very knowledgeable technicians who are more than happy to guide you through any process that you're trying to accomplish. The tech support agents are very efficient. Eighty percent of the time that I contact Quorum, my issue is resolved within 15 to 20 minutes.

However, there seems to be a lack of technicians. Sometimes they are very busy and I don't hear back for a day or two. The technicians they have are great. They are fantastic, but it seems difficult, at times, to get in contact with anyone.

We have had them actually put us at the front of the line when it has been a critical emergency.

It was very easy to integrate and configure and set up. It's straightforward. Having had the process explained to me the first time, I have been able to manage the system on my own ever since.

The deployment took a day.

The implementation plan was to get the device plugged in and turned on. The Quorum technician would then connect and help with any final configuration. We had already had a few configuration talks beforehand regarding what was required with the device we bought. Then we just needed to start the backups on each of our servers.

The solution is definitely an extra cost, but it's an extra cost that's worth it because of what it offers. It's not a necessary expense, as I could do similar things with a hard drive that was getting backed up to every night, but having Quorum, I can now recover every few hours instead of every few day and I can get immediate recovery on servers that have critical failures. It has proven its worth and its cost, but it is an extra cost that isn't strictly required.

The ease of recovering from data loss is huge, as well as the peace of mind, knowing that if something does happen, I can have a replacement running in a matter of minutes.

The total for our current solution's licensing is about $14,000 for 12 servers for three years. We bought hardware from Quorum which was part of the total. We paid upfront to get a discount.

We had just started using it when I was hired on, and I was just a helpdesk technician at the time. I was taught how to use it, but wasn't heavily involved in the process until a few years in. Earlier this year we did look at at least one other viable solution. After doing some cost analysis of both the other solution and Quorum, Quorum came out much cheaper, and we got way more for the money we were spending.

My advice would be to make sure you leave your protected node configuration with plenty of extra hard drive space.

Everything has functioned the way we've needed it to. They're in a transition phase now with a new interface and this new architecture, so I'm withholding judgment for the most part on that, as they are still figuring things out.

We have three users, whose roles are server administration and our CIO, but it's mostly me as server administrator. The solution requires one person for deployment and maintenance of the solution.

This solution provides us with business continuity. It is far more than just a DR, or backup solution. It keeps our business up and running with redundant backups of business-critical systems and files that would shut us down if lost. I would suggest this product over all others.

This is true peace of mind for all IT admins. OnQ works, simple as that. This is also the first and only company that has reached out to me because they saw issues before we did. That proactive approach is absolutely invaluable, is another reason why I suggest this product to anyone I talk to.

Being able to spin up a machine in a sandbox is amazing because it allows us to test things that we otherwise would not be able to do.

The self-test feature isn't anything new, but to not have that functionality these days should be a deal-breaker for any company looking for a solution.

At times the email notifications don't go out, but a quick reset always fixes that problem.

I have been using this solution for six years.

Stability is very good, with a couple of non-critical features needing resets once in a while.

This solution is easily scalable.

Amazing throughout the last six years. A lot of companies get too big too fast and can't keep up with the support calls but that has never happened.

I have used many different solutions and at the time, none of them came even close to what OnQ provided. They were ahead of the game, everyone else had to catch up after going public with this product.

The initial setup is easy and straightforward, very seamless.

The level of expertise is ten out of ten.

With regard to ROI, it is invaluable.

The cost is higher than other software and services, but it is an absolute must-have. It pays for itself daily, even if you never have a disaster (knock on wood).

We looked at Veeam, Unitrends, Datto, and Dell.

It's hard to say where this product needs improvement, as we have not had any problems or needs other than what is already provided, and we are more than happy with the value we are getting out of OnQ.

We use OnQ for daily backups of all of our mission-critical servers.

Daily backups are consistent and recovering files/folders is very easy. In extreme cases, we have used the ability to spin up a VM on the Quorum device for use in our production environment, which is a great feature and also very easy to do.

The most valuable feature is spinning up a ready-to-go VM in a test or production environment that is based on a backup stored on the Quorum device.

We have had one issue with backups for SQL servers. We found that some of the live SQL databases we were backing up would be inconsistent when we would restore them. We now have to consistently monitor the integrity of those databases.

My first-hand experience with this solution is three years. Total organization use is around eight years.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

When we first got the Quorum the licensing was different.

We did not evaluate other options.

I use Quorum OnQ to backup all of the production servers on my network. These include all file, AD, email, and financial servers. We are using OnQ to back up full images of servers as well as simple file backups. This is our primary disaster recovery solution.

When I started at my current organization they had a scattered approach to backup. Some servers backed up locally, some to various cloud services, others not at all. Management of all those solutions was a disaster. OnQ allowed me to back everything up consistently and for less money. I get a daily digest and I know that my systems are protected.

I have used the BMR (Bare Metal Restore) in several emergencies and it has absolutely saved my bacon. I love being able to bring up a machine as a VM too. I've used that to test system upgrades and system deployments without having to worry about breaking anything in production. It is easy to wipe and repeat those tests as you need to.

I don't love the scheduler, as I think that interface could use an overhaul. I have always managed to get it to work the way I wanted it to, but it could be nicer and more user-friendly. Having to pick that a job repeats every 23:59 is a bit ridiculous in this day and age.

I have used this solution for thirteen years at two different companies.

This solution is rock solid and something I rely on every day.

For a small business, this solution has everything I need.

I have used support dozens of times in the past thirteen years and in all cases they were helpful, professional, and knowledgeable.  

I have used Backup Exec with DLT and LTO type tapes. Tape backup is just a thing of the past and Backup Exec just didn't have good offsite options at that time.

 I have used EVault and similar remote solutions, but the bandwidth was always an issue. They didn't perform good delta backups and didn't offer BMR at all.

The initial setup is very simple. They walk you right through it.

The vendor team set up and shipped the server to me, preconfigured. I then worked with an implementation specialist to get everything working on my network. I couldn't have asked for an easier process or better people to work with.

On multiple occasions, I have had to run a server in recovery mode because the physical server failed (motherboard failure, etc.). Our business was able to run normally during those times and when new hardware was in I was able to do a BMR without interrupting business.  That is fifty coworkers who were not idled because of failed hardware. That is pretty huge.

This is the best money I spend on my budget. We have never questioned whether it is worth it because it so obviously is a great value.

At this point, I haven't looked at other solutions in many years. I moved to OnQ thirteen years ago at my previous company and loved it. When I started at my new company and saw the mess their backup was in, I immediately switched to OnQ.

Setup was a breeze, and the support and training is excellent. If you are a knowledgeable user, then they will work with you at your level, but if you just need them to do it for you then they will do that too.